Comment by jandrese

Comment by jandrese 2 days ago

> It had the revolutionary touch screen, yes, but you couldn't really DO that much with it.

You glossed over the one killer feature of the original iPhone: It had a fully functional web browser and enough compute power to just barely run it. This was the thing that made all previous smartphones instantly obsolete. No goddamn WAP proxy. No needing 3-4 minutes to get Yahoo to render. It didn't completely trash the layout of every other page. It was an actually useful web browser.

alkonaut 2 days ago

As I remember it there was a time before and after 3G for web browsing. The fidelity of the iPhone Safari early on was great, but those early 2 generations didn't really have the bandwidth to do much with it. Still, I agree it was a leap ahead of the rest.

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jandrese 2 days ago

It's not unfair to say the first generation iPhone was a bit of an aspirational device. It helped a lot if you found some working public WiFi, but even then the speed wasn't entirely the fault of the radio, the processor and especially RAM on the phone hurt performance.
It's not hard to see why the iPhone 3G was a major success. It smoothed over so many of the rough edges from the original iPhone.

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